Facebook have announced a German version of the product with be available immediately.

They used 2000 volunteers from Germany to complete the task in a few weeks. A voting system was used to decide on the accuracy of the translation. This is a very Web 2 approach to product design and development and of course all the participants will tell their friends and family about their work on the project so providing a massive word-of-mouth campaign.

MySpace does it the traditional way by hiring local people to manage the translation.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook can take Germany by storm. There is already a very strong well established local competitor so it faces a tough task.